Read and find out about light in this colorfully illustrated nonfiction picture book.

Light is all around you! It comes in many forms: Light from the sun brightens our day, firelight flickers in the night, electric lights fill our homes—and some animals even make the sea glow.

With lively illustrations and diagrams and clear, engaging text, this Level 2 Let's-Read-and-Find-Out picture book is an engaging look into the many ways that light brightens our world.

Now rebranded with a new cover look, this book features rich vocabulary and uses simple, fun diagrams to clearly explain concepts like light speed. This book also includes a find out more section with activities that show why plants need light to grow and why our shadows look different throughout the day.

This is a clear and appealing science book for early elementary age kids, both at home and in the classroom. Both text and artwork were vetted for accuracy by Russell P. Leslie, Professor and Associate Director of the Lighting Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

This is a Level 2 Let's-Read-and-Find-Out, which means the book explores more challenging concepts for children in the primary grades. The 100+ titles in this leading nonfiction series are:

• hands-on and visual
• acclaimed and trusted
• great for classrooms

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

The famous novelist de Wohl presents a stimulating historical novel about the great St. Thomas Aquinas, set against the violent background of the Italy of the Crusades. He tells the intriguing story of St. Thomas who defied his illustrious, prominent family's ambition for him to have great power in the Church by taking a vow of poverty and joining the Dominicans.

The battles and Crusades of the 13th century and the ruthlessness of the excommunicated Emperor Frederick II play a big part of the story, but it is Thomas of Aquino who dominates this book. De Wohl succeeds notably in portraying the exceptional quality of this man, a fusion of mighty intellect and childlike simplicity. A pupil of St. Albert the Great, the humble Thomas, through an intense life of study, writing, prayer, preaching and contemplation, ironically rose to become the influential figure of his age, and later was proclaimed by the Church as the Angelic Doctor.

In 1849 Emmeline Erle and her widowed mother move from sunny southern Europe to cold and grimy Birmingham, England. The town is one of great contrasts: progress and poverty, industrial expansion and murky slums, new villas and filthy streets. Darkness and light battle in the minds of its people: principles of freedom and tolerance struggle with ignorance and prejudice; deep doubt of religious truth coexists with fanaticism.

Emmeline quickly makes friends in her new home— Lizzie, the hardworking servant, and Daniel, the schoolboy living next door. For both Emmeline and Daniel, Father John Henry Newman, who runs a chapel in one of the worst sections town, becomes the most important person in Birmingham.

Daniel and Emmeline come to know and admire Father Newman as he tries to help poor factory workers and to enlighten citizens blinded by suspicion and bigotry. With him they experience the anxieties of a cholera outbreak and the dangers of anti-Catholic riots. Caught up in one excitement or trouble after another, the young people finally arrive at happier times, while the walls of Father Newman's new church, a symbol of light in a dark town, rise into the smoggy Birmingham sky.

This colorful and dramatic story for youth brilliantly unfolds the panorama of Victorian England—the Industrial Revolution, the Oxford movement, the Crystal Palace, and Prince Albert opening a new railway. But above all, this book portrays the character and wisdom of John Henry Newman.

FANDEX brings the world of Western Art to your fingertips with a field guide to painters, their legacies and the often extreme lives they led. A chronology from Giotto, the first modern painter, to Frank Stella, whose black paintings proclaimed "what you see is what you see." Here is Michelangelo, who resented having to paint the Sistine Chapel because it took him away from sculpture. Botticelli and Vermeer, whose work languished in obscurity until the nineteenth century. And Mary Cassatt, the only American to be included with the Impressionists. Illustrating each entry is a portrait of a self-portrait of the artist plus significant paintings and details.

• 50 INDIDIVIDUALLY DIE-CUT CARDS
• FULL COLOR THROUGHOUT
• KNOWLEDGE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
• FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY